World 400 meters hurdles champion Jana Rawlinson has been forced to withdraw from next month's Olympic Games team because of a long-standing toe injury, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) said on Wednesday. Rawlinson, who won her second world championship title last year in Japan just months after giving birth to her first child, returned to competition in Poland last week after the toe problem and subsequent surgery in January kept her out for nine months. “The key to her Beijing chances would be how she pulled up from her Poland race and sadly she had been unable to train since she raced,” the AOC said in a statement. “The 25-year-old had been racing against time for several months and has now exhausted all possible options.” Rawlinson had earlier in the day been confirmed by the AOC in the athletics team and was probably the country's leading medal hope. Her chances had appeared to improve greatly with news that Russia's world record holder Yulia Pechyonkina was suffering heart problems and likely to miss Beijing, while leading Americans Lashinda Demus and Christine Spence both missed out on the Games in their country's trials last week. It is the second Olympic setback of Rawlinson's career. She finished fifth at Athens after a knee injury hampered her final preparations, a year after winning her first world title in Paris. Hansen retires Britain's former triple-jump world champion and world record holder Ashia Hansen has announced her retirement from athletics due to fitness concerns. The 36-year-old Hansen had hoped to compete at this weekend's National Championships and Olympic trials in her home city of Birmingham. But instead she has decided it is the right time to call time on a glittering career which saw her twice win the world indoor title. “It would have been great to have competed at the National Championships this weekend, but sadly it's not to be,” Hansen said. “I'm just not in a position to compete at the level I would want to.” The former European and Commonwealth Games champion has struggled to regain her best form after sustaining a serious knee injury at the 2004 European Cup final. That effectively wrecked her Olympic ambitions for Athens, where she was expected to be a strong gold medal contender. Now she has counted herself out of contention for Beijing, explaining: “It had just become clear to me that I can no longer train through the pain of injury as I used to do. It's time to take the pressure of myself.”
